I've been dreaming awake for too long, walking circles, and the soles of my
eyes are jet black.
The last shithouse rat I consulted suggested that I might need a change of scenery,
and recommended that I move to a grottier city. Someplace where your face gets
dirtier when you rub it on the street. This is the essence of culture, he tells
me: to experience the degradation of travel.
"What the hell do you know about it?" I shouted at him, just as somebody
knocked on the door.
"What?" said the voice outside.
"Occupied," I said, reflexively, in the contractual third-person melody.
The hour was up, so I threw my last hundred bucks down the toilet-hole and fastened
my pants. When I opened the door, there was nobody out there. I looked at the
sky. It was full of corkscrews. The trees were muttering, but I couldn't tell
if it was wind. I read the light: three sources (red setting sun, two early-blooming
sodium-vapor lights down the gravel road, still warming up, raydiosity low.)
I powered up the binocs. Nothing funny on IR.
I stepped into my own screaming tinnitus and walked to the car, keeping an eye
on the chrome, the reflections in the windshield, the distorted silhouette Dr.
Seuss trees.
The doorhandle sounded like a gunshot in the whining silence, and the major-thirds
song of my conscientious keys mocked me as I got in.
Coins are keys you give away. Put 'em in a coke machine, they unlock a coke.
Put 'em in a parking meter, they unlock time. Put 'em in the meth machine, and
they unlock the failsafe. Then you can push all the buttons. And with your numb
fingers, you might be able to type out a vibrating version of what happened
on the keys you have left.
If it weren't for the past, things would be different.
Ha-ha!
The horizon is a flat oscilloscope at this altitude. I can hear the ocean in
my shell.
Waveforms laugh green like trees when you try to un-collapse them. They elbow
the scrambled eggs, and everybody chuckles. That's all we've got going for us
at the moment. Tonight I heard a story, and I laughed so hard I cried. For a
moment, the water in my eyes corrected my vision, like dyamic neural contact
lenses. Looking through waves, I saw clearly.
I have to work the reaction backwards. It's going to happen anyway. I'm going
to laugh the split world back together. And I've got a sky full of coiling cameras
to record the whole thing.
I've got nowhere to go. The payphone took my keys.

Oh, and I'm going to re-incorporate the concept of the Kamikaze (project comes
full-circle... supercollision!)

I'm playing with the idea of the title having a rider or subtitle. Something
like: "a methamphetamine rocket-ride through a mind unsafe at any speed."

Here's the basic idea:

It's a story told by a guy who's hallucinating the whole time he tells it,
but somehow he has retained a subset of the craft required for storytelling.
This will allow seemingly random (not random: nested-fractal, but lots of people
won't know the difference) perspective and narrative-subject shifts that will
make a kind of sub-intuitive sense.
I am considering encapsulating it thusly: The outer, or timing narrative, is
the story of a Kamikaze who leaves on a mission, reconsiders his motivations,
and changes course to find someplace to have lunch. Inside that, we'll have
the first-person narrative of the supposed author describing the failure of
the catWave project, starting with Elevator Music and your Cat-cam 'what if'
suggestion and carrying through to a climax of paranoid hallucination brought
on by the methamphetamine component of the research for the book. [You, by the
way, get to be incorporated into Stuccomeyer, the sidekick-element in this:
a kind of devil-may-care garage-style philosopher who, when presented with the
opportunity, will always try to get the narrator into more trouble.] Inside
the failure-of-catwave structure, we'll have the poor, battered artifact itself:
fragments of catWave, well-crafted but with no basis in science or reality,
entirely shot down by research, meticulously deconstructed. Potentially very
funny!